Japan plans fastest supercomputer

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Japan has plans to start building a supercomputer next year that
can operate 73 times faster than the world's fastest supercomputer,
the government says.

The American Blue Gene/L system supercomputer developed by IBM
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California,
currently holds the title of the world's fastest. That machine is
capable of 136.8 teraflops, or 136.8 trillion calculations per
second, according to Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science and Technology.

Japan wants to develop a supercomputer that can operate at 10
petaflops, or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 73
times faster than the Blue Gene, an official of the ministry
said.

Kyodo News reported that the total amount for the project was
estimated at between ¥80 billion and ¥100 billion ($A937
million to $A1.17 billion) and the ministry will request ¥10
billion for the next fiscal year's budget.

The ministry official could not confirm the figures, saying it
had yet to reach a formal decision, which is expected by the end of
August.

But he said that if the budget for next year was approved, the
ministry hoped to complete the next-generation supercomputer
sometime in fiscal 2010, which ends in March 2011.

Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer, introduced in 2002, had
been the world's fastest until 2004, when the IBM's Blue Gene took
the title, he said.

Currently, the Earth Simulator, at a speed of 35.9 teraflops, is
ranked fourth after the IBM's two Blue Gene systems and NASA's
Columbia system, all in the US, according to the top 500 list of
the world's fastest supercomputers, released at the International
Supercomputing Conference held in June in Heidelberg, Germany.

The Earth Simulator is used to track global sea temperatures,
rainfall and crustal movement to predict natural disasters over the
next few centuries.

The ministry wants to use the planned supercomputer for a wider
use such as simulating the formation of galaxy and the interactions
between a medicine and the human body.